Google announced that its mobile-first indexing "trek" is now "complete." Which is strange to me being that Google said it was done moving sites to mobile-first indexing last May but hey, now it is really done and it only took just under seven-years to complete.
John Mueller, Search Advocate, and Nir Kalush, Search Console wrote, "It's been a long road, getting from there to here. We're delighted to announce that the trek to Mobile First Indexing is now complete."
Also, with this announcement, Google is removing the indexing crawler information in the settings page in Search Console. That is the section in the about box that tells you when you switched over to mobile-first indexing, over here:
I should note, that there was a bug with the indexing crawler status for some sites where it currently shows a site being indexed using the desktop crawler when it is being indexed using the mobile crawler. I guess there is no need for Google to fix that bug if they will remove that feature. But as I said in that original story, most won't really know if they switched over to mobile-first indexing (just assume you did I guess).
Google also said:
- A "very small set of sites" do not work at all on mobile devices.
- These sites simply don't load at all on mobile devices
- Google can't do anything to get them to be indexed by mobile-first indexing
- Google will continue to try to crawl these sites with its legacy desktop Googlebot crawler
- Google will re-evaluate the list a few times a year
- Google will reduce crawling with its legacy desktop Googlebot as much as possible
In November 2022, John said the last batch of mobile-indexing is coming soon. Before that, he said that the last batch would be in July 2022 but then in August said they were not done. As a reminder, Google started its mobile-first indexing initiative over six years ago, in November 2016. But we still have sites that are being migrated over from Google desktop-first indexing to mobile-first indexing at the end of 2022.
Yes, last November, Google removed any deadline they had for the mandatory mobile-first indexing switchover. As a reminder, in May 2021, we reported that mobile first indexing switch was not done yet and then in March we reported that Google was going to migrate over the last batch of sites to mobile first indexing soon. This was after moving the mobile-first indexing deadline from September 2020 to March 2021.
Earlier this year, John Mueller of Google said that the process might be done in the coming months. And then in May, Google said that was the last batch but maybe it wasn't?
I asked John about that, and he said, "I thought it would be good to do an official blog post & to mention the SC changes."
Forum discussion at X.
Update: The Indexing crawler details in Google Search Console is now gone as of November 10th:
Google dropped the Indexing crawler from Google Search Console today - more details on why from our old story at https://t.co/9RgaAGP4RZ pic.twitter.com/bcYh8UyYqt
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 10, 2023
